Walton Street Blacksoil fund gets commitments of Rs 360 cr for its new fund

The Rs 500 crore fund has an additional green-shoe option of Rs 250 crore

Walton Street BlackSoil Real Estate Debt Fund II (WSBREDF-II) on Thursday said it received commitments of Rs 360 crore for the first closing of its Rs 500 crore fund. The fund has an additional green-shoe option of Rs 250 crore.

The debt fund plans to invest the generated funds in self-liquidating senior secured debt instruments, with a target security cover of more than two times, focusing on middle-income residential real estate projects across key tier-I cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi/NCR. The debt fund is registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) as a category II Alternative Investment Fund (AIF).

Recently, BlackSoil and the former India-based management team of US real estate investment advisor Walton Street Capital, joined forces to acquire Walton Street India’s real estate debt business. The India management team is led by Kaushik Desai, Vinit Prabhugaonkar and Vimal Jangla.

Earlier in 2018, Walton Street BlackSoil Real Estate Debt Fund I (WSBREDF-I) was launched with committed capital of Rs 320 crore. It was fully deployed earlier this year, across 10 investments in the key metros of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, more than 50 per cent of which has been returned. WSBREDF-I has invested in marquee developers like Cybercity, Bollineni and Saket, amongst others.

The affordable and mid-income residential segment accounted for more than half of the new launches in Q2FY21. With reduced availability of capital for residential real estate development, the funds generated from WSBREDF-II will be deployed to provide financial assistance to developers to ensure consistent cash flow and timely completion of projects.

Kaushik Desai, managing partner, Walton Street India Real Estate Advisors, said, “After the successful deployment of our first real estate debt fund, the focus of our second fund is to provide financing to developers with proven track records of execution across the mid-income housing sector in our key markets driven by end-user demand, to invest in key in-fill projects with full control over cash flow and visibility on financial closure and completion. We have received a tremendous response from the prior investors in WSBREDF-I for our second fund. We are pleased to have achieved a first closing with more than 70% of the target fund size already committed.”

Since 2013, and prior to the launch of WSBREDF-II, Walton Street Capital India and BlackSoil have jointly placed more than Rs 1,500 crore of debt capital across more than 50 real estate transactions.